Sunday, August 19, 2018

Pictures Or It Didn't Happen : Bless Online

Bless Online is beautiful. I'm in two minds whether it's as beautiful as Black Desert Online but it very well might be. It's been too long since I last played BDO to remember exactly how it looked but I do recall being stunned by the scenery and mesmerized by the realism of the architecture.

Black Desert has had a graphical upgrade since then. I really ought to patch it up and take a look. For now, though, my visual cortex is too busy being overwhelmed by Bless.

Playing GW2, I'm somewhat habituated to extraordinary architectural sights. ArenaNet's art department gosh-wows for a day job. The towns and villages in both Black Desert and Bless - and indeed in a number of Eastern imports - seem somehow more solid and, dare I say it, realistic.

The flagstones seem more weathered, the bricks have a patina that comes from years of sun and rain. Weeds and moss grow in the cracks. Everything has a lived-in look. Compare it with Divinity's Reach, that stunning set-piece of a city, and Queen Jenna's capital has the look of a movie set rather than a working town.

The interiors in Bless are equally stunning. The rooms I've seen are properly furnished for purpose. The state rooms are luxurious and imposing, the academic halls and labs are cluttered and characterful and the rural lean-tos are spartan and shabby.

In common with almost every on and offline rpg with a supposedly high-medieval setting I've ever played, the sense of scale is off the scale. Why is it that no-one can put in a ceiling without leaving enough headroom for a giraffe? I realize I'm exaggerating the dimensions by always playing the shortest possible characters but even so.

There are a lot of moving parts in a mining town in Bless. Cables stretch across the sky. Cars carry coal to the furnaces. Paternosters shunt endlessly between the upper and lower decks. It's no Black Citadel but then what is? I love my sheet metal.

In the mountains the air is clear and the grass is too tall for a Mascu to peer over. The grey scree reminded me a little of FFXI but the inspiration for much of the game is very clearly - very clearly - FFXIV. More on that, perhaps, when I get to my First Impressions post. Tomorrow, I hope.

Thus far I'm enjoying Bless a lot. It doesn't mean much. I enjoy all new MMOs a lot at first if they have gorgeous scenery and easy leveling. I've played around five or six hours, I think. I could log into Steam and check but if I do I'll end up playing more and I have dailies to do in Tyria first. I'm finding Bless quite compulsive.

One area in which Bless can't begin to compete - literally - with either BDO or FFXIV is player housing. It has none. Apparently it might one day but at the moment its just an item on a wish list. Until then, I'm claiming this entire village. There's no-one here but me.

I really love the color schemes they've used in those interiors. They look both coherent and appropriate. Also I like the sparing use of furniture and the mix of rich, vibrant soft furnishings with the more aged, worn woodwork. It's a big gameworld and I haven't seen much of it yet - looking forward to exploring more.

I will await your first impressions but my interest in this game waned when I checked out the Steam reviews. They are universally bad and that cannot be just disgruntled players. Looking forward to getting your thoughts.

This is a good point: it's easy to like an MMO when you are playing it as a single player game, leveling, doing quests, watching the scenery. But what will happen when that's over and you actually have to play the MMO?

But I never will "have to play the MMO", will I? It's entertainment not a job. I'll enjoy it for as long as it amuses me and then I'll drop it and find something else to do instead. Arguably, the developer might have a problem, if they rely on keeping people playing in order to make a living, but that's their problem, not mine. And most likely they'll have another project in the works to take over from this one when it runs out of steam.

I take your point, made in your own post today, about whether this stuff needs to be in MMO form rather than a single-player rpg but as I've written many times, I find single-player games weird and alienating these days. I like to do my solo stuff in a shared environment with other people because, I guess, I am a social animal. It just feels more complete. As I've said before, it's similar to how I prefer to read a novel sat at a cafe table or in a pub rather than alone at home or watch a movie in a cinema rather than on DVD.